A computing system might comprise a logically bounded set of nodes associated with a certain set of users. From time to time new computing equipment is often installed in existing computing environments to expand the computing resources available to users of the existing computing systems. The existing computing systems have a wealth of configuration information describing their respective users and/or environments. The user information (e.g., user roles, user permissions, etc.), for example, might be used to manage access to the resources (e.g., data, services, etc.) in an existing computing environment. Also, the environment information might describe various virtualized entities (e.g., virtual machines, executable containers, etc.), network interfaces, data storage (e.g., virtual disks) information, and/or other information in the existing computing environment.
Unfortunately, configuration information from an existing computing system may not be easily accessible and/or may not be structured for use by newly installed computing equipment. Often, the newly installed computing equipment has processes and/or capabilities that depend on configuration information being presented in a particular form (e.g., object versus text value) or format (e.g., UTF-8 versus ASCII) or representation that is different than the representation that is used in the existing computing environment. This can happen when the newly installed computing equipment is of a different type than the existing computing system (e.g., a different vendor or different operating system, etc.). In such cases, merely copying the configuration information (e.g., user information, environment information, etc.) from the existing computing environment to the newly installed computing equipment will fail to properly and fully configure the newly installed equipment.
Even in the case where some of the configuration data can be copied over, there are frequently situations where the new computing equipment supports new capabilities that are not present in the existing computing environment. Moreover, newly installed computing equipment might need to rely on or refer to the existing computing environment as an ongoing source of truth for certain dynamic configuration information (e.g., user roles changes, new user additions, etc.). Merely copying data from one system to another system will not address this need. What is needed is a technological solution that efficiently establishes and dynamically updates the configuration information of the new computing equipment in a manner that facilitates initial and ongoing operation of the newly installed computing equipment.
Some of the approaches described in this background section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by their inclusion in this section.